According to Asgaut Viste at Department of Surgical Studies at the University in Bergen, medical mistreatment causes more deaths than deaths from AIDS, traffic accidents, and breast cancer [1]. There are serious ethical aspects involved in making errors causing severe pain and/or losses for the patients and their relatives. Another aspect is that there are huge economical and capacity savings at hospitals/-medical institutions involved by preventing medical mistreatment from happening, as compared to costs associated with treating/alleviating the damage caused by erroneous medical treatment.
Training personnel to handle emergency situations have long been mandatory in safety critical applications such as aviation, shipping, process industry etc. by use of simulating potential accidents/incidents. The workplace environment in such places is often technologically complex and there may be short time margins between occurrence of an incident and the required correct response to avoid severe consequences. There are also typically considerable risks involved in misjudgements, placing a high stress on the operator(s) taking care of the incident. Simulation of potential incidents and drilling the employees to respond to them is known to be an effective tool for reducing the risks for making misjudgements and thus erroneous responses in such cases.
In health services, the use of patient simulators has been found effective in maintaining skills, training and education of personnel which is expected to encounter medical emergency situations and to practice life saving skills. A patient simulator is a realistic, interactive human resembling training manikin which may be given a range of clinical functionalities and which may respond to clinical intervention, instructor control and/or pre-programmed scenarios. Examples of clinical functionalities may be spontaneous breathing patterns with varying depths and rates, voice sounds, realistic normal and abnormal heart, breath and bowel sounds, cardiac rhythms with synchronized pulses, changeable anatomy to represent conditions such as tongue edema, pharyngeal swelling and laryngospasm, adjustable fontanel, blood pressure synchronized with cardiac rate rhythms, bleeding control modules etc.
Patient simulators should be made to feel and look as human as possible in order to provide simulations as realistic as possible of real life incidents. One aspect in providing this illusion of reality is to provide the patient simulator with a pulse beat that feels like the pulse beat of a live human. The pulse beat of the patient simulator should be able to mimic any normal and abnormal cardiac rhythm in order to possible medical conditions, and these different cardiac rhythms should feel similar on the skin of the patient simulator as they would do in a real human patient.